Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

“ Science and philosophy fancy themselves the adversaries of so-called Christianity, and pride themselves upon the fact, while they, in reality, work for it. Science and philosophy address everything except the one important point: how man is to improve his condition and lead a better life. The teaching of morality, called ethics, has quite disappeared from our so-called Christian society.
Neither believers nor unbelievers ask themselves how we ought to live, and how we must use the reason that is given to us ”

“ But free will is not only an illusion; it is a word that has really no meaning. It is a word invented by theologians and legislators; and to try to disprove its existence is but wrestling with a windmill. ”

“ This erroneous idea of the meaning of life has perverted the whole activity of man. The dogma of the fall and of the redemption of man has closed the most important and lawful domain of man’s activity to him, and has excluded from the whole sphere of human knowledge the knowledge of what man must do to be happier and better. ”

“ He who exalts in himself the son of God over all the rest that is in him, he who believes that life is in himself alone, will not find himself in contradiction with life. The contradiction only results from men not believing in the light that is in them; the light of which John the Evangelist speaks when he says, ‘In him is life, and the life is the light of men.’
Christ teaches us to exalt above all else the human son, who is the son of God and the light of men. ”

“ People come to a farm, and find all they want there; a house with all necessary utensils, barns full of corn, cellars full of all kinds of provisions; in the yard are implements of husbandry, tools, harnesses, horses, cows, and sheep – in a word, all that is necessary for living contentedly. People crowd in and begin to use what they find, each mindful of himself alone, never thinking of leaving anything either for those who are with him in the house, or for those who are to come after him. Each wishes to have all for himself. ”

“ Let a man but set aside the teaching he has imbibed from his childhood, let him transfer himself in thought into a new man, not brought up in that teaching, and then let him imagine in what light this teaching would appear to him. ”

“ And the question, ‘Am I to eat the apples that tempt me?’ according to this teaching, no longer applies to man. Adam solved the question in the negative, once and forever, in the garden. Adam sinned, that is, Adam erred, and we all fell irrevocably, and all our endeavors to live rationally are useless, and even godless. I am irrevocably bad, and I must know it. My salvation does not lie in the fact that I can order my life by my reason, and, having learned to know good from evil, do what is best. No, Adam sinned once for all, and Christ has, once and for ever, set the evil right ”

“ It is in the nature of man to strive after what is best. Each teaching of life is but a teaching of what is best for man. If men have pointed out to them what is really best for them, how do they come to answer that they wish to do what is best, but cannot?
Human intellect, ever since man has existed, has been directed toward discovering what is best among all the demands that are made both in individual and in social life. ”

“ It is only through the influence of this false teaching, engrained in the minds of our generations, that we can explain how it is, just like man spitted out that apple of knowledge of good and evil that he ate in the Paradise according to the scripture, that man has forgotten that his whole history is but an endeavor to solve the contradictions between his rational and animal nature. ”

“ Materialism, with its strange enthusiastic assertion that man is but a process, is the lawful child of this teaching, which acknowledges that the life here below is a fallen life. Spiritism, with its learned partisans, is the best proof that scientific and philosophical views are not free, but are based on the principle, inculcated by religion, that a blissful eternal life is natural to man. ”

“ Both before Christ and after him people have said the same: that there lives in man a divine light, sent down from heaven, and that light is ‘reason,’ and each must follow that light alone, seeking for good by its aid alone. ”

“ Each hastens to take as much as he can, and consequent destruction of everything ensues; all are struggling, fighting to possess the property themselves; milk cows and unshorn sheep about to kid are killed for meat; the ovens are heated with benches and carts; the men fight for milk and for corn; and thus spill, spoil, and waste more than they use. Not one of them can eat a morsel in peace, each is snarling at his neighbor; a stronger man comes and takes possession of all, and he is despoiled in his turn.
At last these men, all bruised and exhausted with fighting and hunger, leave the farm. ”

“ If men would but keep from ruining their own lives, and keep from expecting someone from outside to come and help them – either Christ on the clouds, with the flourish of trumpets, or some historical law, or the law of the differentiation and integration of power! No one will help them, if they do not help themselves. ”

“ The teaching of this creed is literally as follows: God eternal, Three Persons in one God, chose to create a world of spirits. The bountiful God created that world of spirits for their happiness; but it chanced that one of the spirits grew wicked, and therefore unhappy. Some time passed away, and God created another world, a material world, and created man, likewise for happiness. God created man happy, immortal, and sinless. Man was happy because he enjoyed all the blessings of life without labor; immortal, for he was always to live thus; sinless, for he did not know evil. ”

“ No sooner do men find it best for themselves to act in a particular way, than they proceed to act in that way, however hard it may be. Then what do we mean by saying the teaching of Christ is sublime, a life in accordance with his teaching would be a better one than the one we now lead, but we cannot lead the life that would be best for us because it is hard to do so? ”

“ Reason, which enlightens our life and forces us to modify our actions, is not an illusion, and cannot possibly be explained away. The following after reason in order to attain happiness was a teaching taught to mankind by all true teachers, and in it lies the whole teaching of Christ. ”

“ The orthodox teaching does not dwell at any length upon the consequent results of the redemption, according to which, after the death of Christ, the earth should have begun to yield up her fruits to believers without labor, sickness should have ceased, and mothers should have given birth to their offspring without suffering; for, however great their faith is, it is difficult to instill into those who find labor hard, and sickness painful, that labor is not hard, and suffering is not painful. ”

“ Hard, because its observance would deprive us of what we have always possessed. Have we never heard that it may be better for us to suffer and to lose, than never to suffer and always to have our desires satisfied? ”

“ Great stress, however, is laid on that part of the teaching that says that ‘death and sin are no more.’
It is confidently asserted that the dead live. And, as the dead cannot possibly tell us whether they are dead or alive, any more than a stone can tell whether it can speak or not, this absence of all denial is taken as a proof of the assertion that those who are dead are not dead. ”

“ Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you; for he who walks in darkness does not know where he goes.’ On being questioned what the words, ‘Lift up the human son’ signify, Christ answers, ‘To live according to the light that is in people.’
The human son, according to the answer given by Christ, is the light in which man must walk while the light is in them. ”

“ Every being endowed with the least germ of reason knows that no great good can be attained without trouble and difficulty. And now we say that though Christ’s teaching is sublime, we can never put it into practice because it is hard to do so. ”

“ The true believer must fancy that ever since Christ came into the world, the earth yields fruit without labor; that children are brought into the world without suffering; that there is no sickness, no death, no sin – i.e., no errors. He must imagine that what is not, is, and what is, is not. ”

“ The teaching of Confucius deals with personal improvement; Judaism consists of man’s following the covenant made with God, and Buddhism teaches each how to escape the evils of life. Socrates taught personal improvement in the name of reason. The Stoics acknowledge rational liberty as the sole basis of the true life.
The rational activity of man has always lain in enlightening, by reason, his striving after good. Free will, says philosophy, is an illusion ”

“ Man may be but an animal, and nobody will find fault with him for being such; but a man cannot reason that he chooses to be only an animal; no sooner does he reason than he admits himself to be a rational being, and, making this admission, he cannot help recognizing a distinction between what is rational and what is irrational. ”

“ The master again makes the farm ready so that men may live there in peace. Again plenty fills the yard, and again passers-by come in, and the struggling and fighting are renewed; all is wasted once more, and the worn-out, bruised, and angry men again leave the farm, abusing and hating their companions and the master too, for having so sparingly and so poorly provided for them. Once again the good master gets the farm ready, and the struggling returns over and over again. Now, one day, among the new comers there appears a teacher who says, ‘Brethren, we are all wrong. ”

“ I am persuaded that, in a few centuries, the history of the so-called scientific activity in Europe during these latter ages will form an inexhaustible subject of laughter and pity for still later generations, who will report somewhat in this style: ‘During several centuries the learned men of the small Western part of the great hemisphere were in a state of epidemic insanity, fancying that a life of eternal bliss was to be theirs ”

“ Such is the teaching of our strictly logical theory of theology. This teaching seems innocent in itself. But a deviation from truth can never be innocent; it entails consequences, more or less important, according to the importance of the subject of the untruth. In this case the subject of the untruth is the whole life of man. ”

“ We must consider, say unbelievers, by what laws the infinitesimal particle of substance moves in the endless expanse of endless time; but it is not necessary to consider what reason requires of man for his own good, because the improvement of his state will not proceed from his own efforts, but from the general laws that we shall discover. ”

“ To prove that ‘the human son’ signifies the son of man is superfluous. In order to consider the words, ‘the human son’ as having any other meaning, it would be necessary to prove that Christ purposely used words that have another meaning to express what he wished to say. ”

“ Men struggle for land, for any object that they may want, and then end by dividing all among themselves, each calling what he may get his ‘personal property.’ They find that though difficult of adjustment, it is better arranged thus, and they keep to their own property. Men fight to get wives for themselves, and then come to the conclusion that it is better for each to have his own family ”

“ Even beasts know in what manner to eat their food without trampling it underfoot; and people who knew how to live better, who believed that God Himself had taught them how they were to live, lived worse, because, as they said, they could not live otherwise. ”

“ According to this teaching the Son of God, God Himself, the Second Person of the Trinity, was sent down from heaven by God, and was made man, to save men from this accidental, temporary state, unnatural to them, to deliver them from the curse laid upon them by the same God for the sin of Adam, and to re-establish them in their former natural state of perfect happiness, i.e., of health, immortality, innocence, and idleness. ”

“ If ‘hard’ means that it is hard to give up the momentary satisfaction of our desires for some great and good end, why do we not say, as well, that it is hard to plough the ground in order to have bread ”

“ According to this teaching, not only are the loves of good and truth, which are innate in man, his endeavors to enlighten by his reason the various phenomena of life, and his spiritual life deemed unimportant, but they are all vainglory and pride. ”

“ This has been said by the Brahmin teachers, by the Hebrew prophets, by Confucius, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and by all truly wise men who were not compilers of philosophical theories, but who sought the truth for their own good and that of all men. ”